A Fatal Fondness

by Richard Audry

  Then, from the window up above the bakery—the window that Mary had just opened—there came the single, sharp BANG of a pistol shot.

  Chapter XXIX

  Jeanette was sitting in the kitchen, sipping tea and chatting with Mrs. Erdahl, the cook, when she heard the ring of the telephone echoing from the front of the house. A moment later, Emma Beach appeared.

  “A gentleman’s on the phone wanting to talk to Mary. But when I told him she wasn’t here, he asked for to you.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Sorry, he declined to say. But he did say it was urgent.”

  Jeanette did a quickstep to the oak pedestal near the front vestibule, where the house’s sole candlestick phone stood. She lifted the transmitter to her mouth and put the receiver next to her ear.

  “Hullo,” she said, enunciating clearly, “Mrs. Harrison here. To whom am I speaking?”

  “It’s Detective Sauer. Do you know where Mary is?”

  Jeanette thought he sounded on edge. “Why no, I don’t. She left about an hour and a half ago to run errands.”

  “Do you think she’s at her office?”

  “Unlikely, on a Saturday. I’m pretty sure, though, she’s not with Mr. Roy. Seems they had a bit of a tiff last night. They were at a party at Herr Neumann’s and…”

  “Mrs. Harrison,” the detective snapped, cutting her off, “did she give you any notion of where she might have gone this morning?”

  “Well, she was going on again about that dreadful business with Beansie and the Ostovian prince and how your chief of police is a nincompoop and how justice ought to be served.”

  There was a deep groan from the other end of the line.

  “I was afraid of that,” the detective said. “I just received word that there’s been a shooting out in the West End, very near the Petrescus’ cobbler’s shop. And given your cousin’s obsession with the Ostovian matter…”

  As his words trailed off, Jeanette almost felt sick to her stomach. “Good lord! You don’t think she’s gone and done anything rash, do you? Put herself in danger?”

  “I certainly hope not. But in case… Well, I thought it might be a good idea if you came along with me. I can pick you up in ten minutes.”

  * * *

  As they rattled west on Third Street in the detective’s carriage, Jeanette spotted a milling clump of people on the south side of the road, in front of a shoemaker’s shop. And among them appeared to be at least two uniformed police officers, trying to impose some order. Detective Sauer slowed the carriage, tugged on the reins, and made a neat U-turn right into a spot in front of the crowd.

  “Detective Sauer!” a burley policeman boomed, striding toward them, as the detective helped Jeanette down from the carriage.

  “Sergeant O’Gara,” the detective said. “What happened here?”

  “We have a woman upstairs there.” The officer pointed to an open second-storey window. “Dead of a gunshot wound to the head.”

  Jeanette felt her knees begin to buckle. “Oh no!” she moaned. “Not Mary!”

  The officer gazed at her with concern. “Did this Mary run this here bakery? Gray-haired? About fifty or sixty?”

  A wave of relief came over Jeanette. “Oh, thank goodness!” She almost laughed with relief. “No, my cousin does not run a bakery. And she’s only about twenty.”

  “The young lady we’re concerned about,” the detective said, “is Miss MacDougall.”

  “Aaah,” Sergeant O’Gara said. “There’s a Miss MacDougall in the shoe shop. She was standing out here with Father Petrescu’s wife when the shot rang out. She’d been up there with the Luca woman a few minutes before, but she said she wouldn’t say anything more until you arrived, Detective Sauer.”

  “I think I’d best have a look upstairs first,” the detective said. “Mrs. Harrison, perhaps you could have a word with our young friend and see how she’s doing. Gently, now. Don’t push her too much.”

  Jeanette watched him worm his way through the crowd with Sergeant O’Gara. Setting her jaw and straightening her shoulders, she headed into the cobbler’s shop. She found Mary sitting ramrod straight in a plain chair by a table full of fancy embroidered items. She had a teacup in her hand, though she seemed to have no interest in sipping from it. The girl had the startled, tremulous look of someone who had just seen a ghost. Her eyes widened when she spied Jeanette.

  “What in the world are you doing here?”

  “I might ask you the same thing,” Jeanette grumbled, standing before her cousin with hands on hips. “When Detective Sauer heard about the shooting, so close to the Petrescus’ place, he called me, wondering where you were. We were both scared to death you’d gone and gotten yourself killed.”

  “So he’s here then?”

  “Upstairs next door, doing whatever unpleasant things he needs to do. Now I have a simple question for you: Are you quite mad?” Not exactly the gentleness the detective had suggested, but Jeanette was not the least bit inclined to go easy on her cousin.

  “I sometimes wonder,” Mary lamented.

  The door in back opened and a small, auburn-haired woman emerged, carrying a shawl. She came over and placed it on Mary’s shoulders, her fierce, dark eyes giving Jeanette the once-over.

  “Jeanette,” Mary said, “this is Mrs. Petrescu, who embroidered my hankies and did the lace for my new gown. Mrs. Petrescu, my cousin Mrs. Harrison.”

  Jeanette was in no mood for small talk and neither, it seemed, was Mrs. Petrescu, who spoke up immediately in her thick Ostovian accent.

  “I am sorry for the danger in which I put Miss MacDougall. But a horrible crime was done in the name of the prince. I knew of it and held my tongue far too long, to my shame. It seemed the police would do nothing. This young lady, foolish or not, has great courage. She was the only one who seemed willing to take action, the only one I could turn to.”

  “To get at the truth about what happened to the MacKenzie boy?” Jeanette asked.

  “Yes, that is right.”

  “And what does the dead woman upstairs have to do with all this?”

  “She killed him, Jeanette,” said Mary. “She took him to the bay and drowned him. With her own hands.”

  The shop door swung open and Detective Sauer came in, doffing his hat before the three women. His expression was particularly grim. Jeanette could only imagine the terrible scene he had just witnessed.

  “Clearly a suicide,” the detective said. “Open and shut. An officer’s searching the room for a note or any other evidence. Not much more to do up there. Now, Miss MacDougall, were you in that apartment before the gunshot?”

  “I was,” Mary acknowledged.

  “How did you come to be there and what happened? Every detail, please.”

  As the detective scribbled in his notebook, Mary described the brief missive she had received from Mrs. Petrescu, who looked relieved to finally have the truth coming out. Then, in as much detail as she could recall, Mary told Mrs. Luca’s story. Of how she became the boy’s governess and protector. Of engineering his escape from Ostovia. Of outrunning assassins across two continents and an ocean.

  “And they go to ground in Duluth, Minnesota,” the detective said.

  “Right. But Mrs. Luca knew they weren’t safe, even here,” Mary continued. “So when Tavish walked into the bakery one day, with a face very much like the prince’s, the scheme bubbled up in her mind.”

  The detective nodded. “Present the world with a dead prince and the assassins might be called off. At least for a while.”

  “Exactly,” Mary said. “Mrs. Luca paid the boy to clean up, and plied him with hot meals and cocoa. He came back time and again. She said he was very fond of her wonderful cocoa. Couldn’t get enough of it. A fatal fondness, you might say—the last time he came, she laced the cocoa with a narcotic. Then she and one of the men took him to the bay.”

  “And from the water in his lungs,” the detective said, “we know he was alive when he went into the water.”
<
br />   Mary nodded. “The man refused to kill the boy, so Mrs. Luca did it herself.”

  Jeanette couldn’t help shuddering. “Ghastly woman!”

  “My husband and I had no idea she would do such a thing,” Mrs. Petrescu put in with a tone of mortification. “No idea at all. My husband is a man of God. He would not have allowed it.”

  “But you two covered it up, just the same,” the detective growled. “Until you found your spine, ma’am.”

  Jeanette had never seen anyone look as rueful as the Ostovian woman did at that moment. There could be no reasonable response and she gave none, staring down at her feet.

  Detective Sauer took a deep breath. “Is Prince Nicolae still here?”

  Mrs. Petrescu, still looking down, shook her head. “No. He and the two men… They have left.”

  “Where to?”

  She looked up and shrugged. “They knew well enough not to say.”

  “Why do you suppose Mrs. Luca didn’t go with them?” Jeanette asked.

  “I think she felt too exhausted to keep running,” Mary said. “Too worn out.”

  “Well,” Jeanette said, “I feel no pity for that woman. She took the coward’s path, killing herself like that.”

  “I’m afraid I may have forced her hand,” Mary said.

  “What do you mean?” Detective Sauer asked.

  Mary sighed. “I made it rather clear that there had to be some kind of justice for Tavish. I made it quite plain that I wasn’t about to let the matter drop.”

  Jeanette could tell the experience had shaken her cousin to the core, had taken her down a few pegs. That typical Mary cockiness had evaporated—an unusual circumstance.

  “I think, though,” Mary continued, her voice shaky, “that Mrs. Luca decided to be her own judge, her own jury, her own executioner. To give me what I asked for. To pay for her terrible crime.”

  “No, you did not make her shoot herself,” Mrs. Petrescu insisted. “It is much simpler. She had cancer in her stomach. She knew she did not have long. She could go no farther with Nicolae. She hoped, perhaps, to satisfy you, Miss MacDougall. But no, you did not make her shoot herself. Her work was done. She wanted to rest.”

  Mary looked as though she wanted desperately to believe that, and so did Jeanette.

  “Still, it didn’t end the way I intended. I wanted her arrested and tried and convicted. I wanted the world to know everything. And now it will just be covered up—and Tavish’s death will go for naught.”

  As Mary spoke, Jeanette finally understood that inside this ambitious, confident young lady—still a teenager—there beat a heart fiercely determined to do good, to reveal truth. Would anyone, even John MacDougall, be able to stop Mary from following her maverick path?

  “It was undoubtedly very plucky of you to browbeat a murderer,” Detective Sauer said, glaring at Mary. “But did you realize she had a gun within reach? What was to stop her from plugging you in the heart?”

  “It was unloaded and on the dresser, Detective. Clearly, she put a bullet in the chamber the instant I left. I was a little bit afraid, I’ll admit. But once I saw her and heard her, I knew she’d given up. Anyhow, I had my own pistol at the ready.”

  “You have a gun?” Jeanette squeaked.

  “Well, two actually,” Mary shrugged, eliciting a groan from the detective. “And I’ve only shot one bullet in anger.”

  “Reporters will be coming, so it’s best you two leave now,” he sighed. “I don’t know how this’ll play out with the chief. I’ll get one of the men to drive you home. In the meantime, I would suggest you remain mum about the whole business.”

  They were a few blocks shy of the MacDougall house on Superior Street, when Jeanette turned to Mary and said, “I don’t think I’m going to tell your father about this…this incident. It’s painfully obvious that you will do what you will do, and no one can stop you. But please, Mary, do consider this—a dead detective can’t solve any cases.”

  Chapter XXX

  “Miss MacDougall,” Jiggs said, doffing his cap, “the boys an’ me really want to thank you for what you done for Beansie. There I was figgerin’ he stole my watch, when all the time he was lyin’ in a hospital, no one knowin’ his name. And you managed to get him planted here in a proper grave, in a nice boneyard, to boot.” He shook his head. “But poor, poor ol’ Beansie. He dint deserve this.”

  Mary and Jeanette were standing together with the three boys there in Shady Oak Cemetery. At their feet was a fresh grave and a simple granite headstone—with a name, two dates, and two brief lines of text, all engraved in classic Roman type. Up above, slate-tinted clouds scudded along and a bitter wind threatened to cut through Mary’s overcoat—a reminder that November wasn’t far off, then the plunge into winter. It was a grim day for a grim task, but it couldn’t be put off.

  “Thank you, miss,” said Gordo. “It’s a real Christian thing you done.”

  “Thanks an awful lot,” Bert added, with quivering chin. “You found a real pretty place for Beansie.”

  “You’re all quite welcome, gentlemen,” Mary replied, touched by the boys’ gratitude.

  Beansie’s three chums were all in what she supposed were their best duds—clean, pressed knee pants and fairly tidy looking worsted jackets. It appeared they had even purchased new neckties for the occasion. The trio had on the same ragged caps they all wore the first time she set eyes on them.

  It had been quite a job, arranging for this little memorial. It took an ample donation to the cemetery’s general fund to obtain a grave that no body would occupy. The managing secretary nervously agreed to keep Mary’s scheme a secret, so long as her sincere intention was to some day transfer the deceased individual to the plot. Getting the headstone done and planted in such short order also required financial incentives.

  While Mary felt guilty about misleading the boys, the secret of Tavish and Nicolae had to be held close, until she could decide what to do. And, moreover, she felt somehow protective of Jiggs and his friends. She wanted to keep them away from the awful truth that Tavish had been murdered with cold, cruel calculation. She was bound and determined that some day—when the truth came out—Tavish would end up here, in this handsome spot, beneath an old, spreading oak tree.

  After a few long moments of silence, Jiggs turned around and blinked at Mary. “The headstone’s perfect, miss. Couldn’t be nicer.”

  “And the verse is so pretty,” Bert added. “Read the words out loud, Jiggsie.”

  Jiggs looked back to the slab of gray granite, straightened his back, and spoke: “Tavish ‘Beansie’ MacKenzie. 1889 to 1902. Good night, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

  “Didja get that verse from the Bible, Miss MacDougall?” asked Bert.

  Mary shook her head. “No, it’s from an old, old story about a sad young prince.”

  “Well, Beansie wasn’t no prince,” observed Gordo. “But who’ll know the difference up in heaven, huh?”

  Jeanette cleared her throat. “Before we go, I think a prayer may be in order.”

  “Quite so,” agreed Mary, realizing the need to give Beansie the proper benediction that he deserved.

  “Let me say it,” said Bert. “I know a good one.”

  And he recited the Lord’s Prayer, getting it word perfect. Not for the first time in this affair, Mary wanted to weep. But she somehow stanched her tears.

  After another moment of silence, she put her arm over Gordo’s shoulder. “Now I was wondering if you gentlemen,” she said, “would be interested in taking lunch with Mrs. Harrison and me at Gustafsson’s Café. As my guests, of course.”

  All three boys lit up like light bulbs.

  “Gustafsson’s!” Bert exclaimed.

  “Would we ever!” Jiggs said

  The two of them went off with Jeanette, heading down the gentle slope of grass toward the lane, where Bill and the surrey awaited. But Mary held back Gordo and said, “Before we go, I need to have a private word with you.”
<
br />   “Yes, miss?” The boy looked a bit wary.

  “Did you know that I figured out who stole Jiggs’s timepiece?”

  His eyes widening, he shook his head. “No, miss.”

  “Take off your cap.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just take it off.”

  Looking suddenly nervous, he did what she ordered.

  “The pawnbroker told me the thief’s a young fellow,” Mary said, “with a cowlick just like this.” Quick as a wink, she yanked lightly on Gordo’s lively sprig of hair and he shrank back out of her grip. “And if I should ever hear of him hurting his friends again or thieving, there’ll be hell to pay. Does he understand?”

  Gordo lowered his eyes, clearly ashamed. “Yes, ma’am,” he said with distinct contrition. “You betcha he understands.”

  * * *

  As Mary waited for the check after lunch, she asked Jiggs if he would mind walking back to the office with Jeanette and her. The three of them said goodbye to Bert and Gordo outside the restaurant and proceeded west on Second Street.

  “What’s it you need, miss?” Jiggs asked.

  “It seems like a thousand years ago,” Mary said, “but we talked about you doing some work for me. Picking things up, dropping things off, and so forth. Being my jack-of-all-trades. Do you remember?”

  “Sure I do, Miss MacDougall. I didn’t say nothin’ more, but I was hopin’ you still want me to help. You just call me at the stable, and I’ll be there like a shot. Or I can come into your office a couple times a day to check in.”

  “And once in a while, Jiggs, during an investigation, we could use an extra pair of eyes. No one would suspect a young fellow like you of being an operative. Would you be interested?”

  “Would I!?” His grin was prodigious. “Me? A detective? Sign me right up.”

  When they arrived at the 335 West building, Jiggs tipped his cap. “So long, ladies, it’s been a pleasure.” He sauntered off, practically walking on air.

  Up in the office Jeanette took off her coat and sat down at her desk. “Such a fine machine,” she said, regarding her new Remington. “It’s too bad the other one got smashed up, but it’s nice to have an employer with a bottomless bank account.”